Hecatomb
Once,
While on a plane to Madeira Island
Sitting by the window,
I got mesmerized by the huge cloud formations.
I was so absorbed by the beauty of these undesigned sculptures,
I failed to understand the privilege of observing them.
Unaware of their permanent state of impermanence,
I laid my head on the window and rested my gaze intentionally.
Suddenly it hits me,
That these enormous landscapes of condensed water,
Will dissolve to never again repeat themselves in their unique shapes.
This thought warmed my heart.
Electricity lifting all the hairs in my arms,
Is this what they call “a mystical experience”?
The privilege!
What can we gain while observing the world
from a different perspective?
Everything!
The knowledge of having witnessed
Such temporary castles build-out of oxygen and hydrogen
Melting my rationality and anxiety,
Justifying my entire existence,
As a witness of the earth’s unpredictability.
No way to record or save that canvas.
In my memory, imperfect as it is,
I try to remember the color scheme,
the gaps in the middle of those gaseous giants,
The 3D shapes, so powerful in their inaccessibility.
Frustration combined with the feeling of the sublime.
Sometimes, all that matters is the present moment,
The opportunity of having had that instant,
That vision,
That feeling of belonging and separation which shapes us to the core.
A recognition of our own fragilities and imagined fragmentations.
Similarly once,
I realized I possessed a womb.
Not just the cartoon version printed in school books,
With blank spaces to name the different parts of the
Female reproductive system.
But a more bloody, pyroclastic, lava exploding version of it.
Tridimensional both in shape and pain.
A rice cooker but for babies.
I mean, I always knew I had one of those,
hidden beneath layers of muscular tissue.
Because it pains me every month.
How sad that we only get to notice the chalice of life,
Through the feelings of severe pain and despair.
The womb is a silent organ.
But the only one which is able to generate life!
Or expel what could have been the building blocks of it.
It breaks itself to be redone month after month,
Like clouds, but warmer and more intimate.
I was unaware of my womb until I met you.
I wanted to decorate it with crystals and melodies for you.
I wanted to acknowledge it and fill it with the names
of our unborn babies.
Once,
You were in my life,
Impermanent just like those cloud formations.
First, full of promise and excitement,
as that egg ready to leave the ovary
traveling intrepidly on its way down to the uterus.
Everything brave and bold and colorful!
Nothing creates bigger vibrations than a promise!
We don’t care much about what is there,
All we want is to anticipate what could be and will be.
Our eyes faithful worshipers of the future!
Our love, growing as the endometrium,
Thickening and pumping blood to receive that hopeful cell,
The one where meiosis meets mitosis and the
Mysteries of life replicate and hide,
Our love, sometimes sublime sometimes frustrating.
The words we made up.
Our own vocabulary now obsolete.
The stories we told ourselves about the way we met,
And the way life always brought us back together.
What is love if not a shared narrative?
One that needs to be constantly retold and reassured,
to avoid evaporation and dissolution,
Our love always separated by clouds.
A collection of airplanes, tickets, timetables.
Weaved through postcards, reconciliations,
The so Portuguese feeling of Saudade
And the sweetness of those hugs amplified by the distance.
Your arms, railways to myself.
Mutable and strong as an octopus,
Our favorite animal and metaphor,
Our hands shaping tentacles,
saying through movement what our lips sealed.
Such joy can’t be codified into language.
Because it precedes it!
But with time, just like my womb, our love became silent.
By finding no ready walls to attach yourself
And slowly eat me from the inside,
You became just like an unfertilized egg,
The fireworks, the pain, the eruption.
A promise broken and in need of bleeding.
A spectacle worse than menstrual cramps,
This unbearable feeling you have while bleeding your shared life away.
Do clouds suffer as much
when their molecules evaporate during a storm?
I lost arms, legs, livers, fingers, teeth I didn’t know I had!
When in an impulse you tarnished what was once
the coziest and most fertile of promises.
Sometimes, I can still access those memories.
But just like clouds, they are unstable and insincere.
My brain gets stopped and is urged
to bring me back to the present moment.
Eyes fixed on the road and so it should be!
So why did it hurt so bad when I realized
that I can’t remember the tone of your voice anymore?